Every year Mom takes me out to buy me clothes as a Christmas gift, usually the first weekend of December. She started doing this probably 20 years ago. She decided that it was silly for her buy me clothes that I might not like or may not fit when we could spend the day together shopping and having fun.

My DH and I are big kids. We cannot wait until Christmas morning to open our gifts, but we can't open them early, either. So, we stay up until midnight when it is "officially" Christmas day and open gifts then. That used to drive my nieces crazy when they were little..."But why can't we stay up and open gifts at midnight? Aunt SamiHami and Uncle Wonderful do! No fair!"

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What have you got? Is it food? Is it for me? I want it whatever it is!

Not really a "gift", but more than 30 years ago, my mother's neighbor brought her a pie on Christmas Eve, covered with a small Christmas towel. The towel got packed away with Mother's Christmas decorations, instead of being returned. The next Christmas, Mother baked a pie, and took it to the neighbor, covered with the towel. The towel has gone back and forth every year since then, always accompanied by a nice visit with the neighbor. She's one of my favorite people, and it's always a nice part of my trip home to get to spend a few minutes with her, and catch up on what our kids are doing.

There is a fruitcake that makes the rounds of a certain subgroup of my friend circle. I believe it started as a Christmas thing but these days gets passed around from one person to another, at one event to another, regardless of season. I got it for the first time this summer, when I hosted a party that three members of the Fruitcake Subgroup attended for the first time. I passed it back to one of them a couple of months later.

I haven't actually *seen* the fruitcake itself, as it's still in its original packaging, covered with signatures from the various people who've had custody of it since ... wait for it ... 1995.

When I was a little girl, Santa always brought me Fruit Stripe gum with the zebra on it. When I was about 10, he stopped. This year, my DH made sure Santa brought me Fruit Stripe gum again. It was the sweetest surprise!

I also had Lifesavers storybooks as a tradition, as do all my kids and stepkids, now.

A really funny one to me is that before I was born when my big brother was 4, all of Christmas was all set up and my father grabbed a chocolate covered cherry and ate it. My mother exclaimed "that is for M!" My father sheepishly suggested that Santa got hungry and had a snack? Every year after that, Santa brought a package of chocolate covered cherries with one missing. My mother continued the tradition even after my parents divorced. When my brother grew up and moved away, he got a box with one missing in the mail...and I got a box back at home. When I grew up, my mother and I began exchanging boxes, both with one missing. When I got married, my now-ex got a box, too, also with one missing. That marriage fell apart, and this year I got remarried and DH and I had a box of chocolate covered cherries with one missing from Santa. But I noticed on Facebook that Santa also brought a box of chocolate covered cherries with one missing at my ex's house!

Chocolate Covered Cherries. Apparently my grandpa would buy a box of those for all of his daughters every year for Christmas. Now it's traditional to exchange boxes of Chocolate Covered Cherries.

Yes! But they must be the individually wrapped Cella cherries. These went up to $4 per box this year! Ugh - so I got each person a box and no extra boxes because of cost. We are celebrating Christmas today and I got up to find DH had bought an extra 6 boxes for me!

Every year I buy a stuffed animal for my kids, to go with their stocking. It doesn't matter that my kids are now 18, 17, and 11, and have nothing to do with toys anymore....they still get that one stuffed animal.

The tradition was started by my mom. She used to give me and my siblings a stuffed animal too, until we moved out on our own.

A few years ago we were exposed to the song "I Want a Hippopatamus for Christmas." My daughter thought it was hysterical, so I always tuck something "hippo" in her stocking. This year it was a hippo stapler from the Metropolitan Museum. When she found it she exclaimed, "Hooray! I wondered what it would be this year!"

After reading as a family the Christmas Chapter from Laura Ingals Wilder's Little House on the Prairie, I started putting a shiny penny in the toe of each stocking. But to account for inflation, I also put in a dollar coin

I have bought my kids pajamas for Xmas Eve...when they were little it was so we could carry them straight to bed when we got home from Grandma's, but now my High Schooler reminded me that we needed to pack them to go to Grandma's and I had to make sure I had some for my girls and our exchange student!

My family never really had Christmas gift traditions (unless you count the day-after run to a few specific stores to return things from Grandma and pick out new stuff that my younger sisters and I always did).

My new tradition is for SO and I to go pick out an annual Christmas ornament with the year on it for our tree—but we wait until the post-Christmas clearance sales to do it.

Also becoming a tradition is for me to stealthily buy something extra for my mom around Christmas and wait until she notices it before fessing up (or, as with this year, until she finally asks my sisters where it came from and they tell her, since they’re in on it too). Every year, she won’t tell me anything about what she needs or what she hasn’t been willing to buy for herself, and every year, we visit and she complains about not having at least one or two things. This year, it was compounded by a house fire in Nov. that caused smoke damage to most of her stuff. Since she no longer had coffee cups or towels of her own—two of her most important things in a daily routine (she is using the furnished rentals’ for now and she hated the small towels), she got a nice-sized coffee cup and two big bath towels. She didn’t notice either for about three days (the cup was next to the coffee pot, and had her first initial on it which she shares with no one else in the family. The towels were a bit more understandable, as she thought they might belong to one of my sisters who was home from college). I think we’ve gotten her coffee cups a few times, good coffee, nice shampoo, etc…

A few years ago we were exposed to the song "I Want a Hippopatamus for Christmas." My daughter thought it was hysterical, so I always tuck something "hippo" in her stocking. This year it was a hippo stapler from the Metropolitan Museum. When she found it she exclaimed, "Hooray! I wondered what it would be this year!"

A few years ago we were exposed to the song "I Want a Hippopatamus for Christmas." My daughter thought it was hysterical, so I always tuck something "hippo" in her stocking. This year it was a hippo stapler from the Metropolitan Museum. When she found it she exclaimed, "Hooray! I wondered what it would be this year!"

Each year, my mom would give my brother a box of chocolate covered cherries of his own, since otherwise he'd open and finish off the "family" box before anyone even knew they were in the house. Mom's been gone for a few years now, but we make sure he still gets his very own box.

This year, I discovered chocolate covered blueberries. A Christmas miracle!! They're going to become a tradition, too

In our house, the pets always open the first gift. For the cats, it is a new catnip toy loosely wrapped in tissue paper. It is hilarious to see them tear into the paper to get to their new, fresh, fragrant toy. Then, of course, there is the fun of having totally stoned cats around the Christmas tree.